Is laptop GPU fried and if so new external gpu?

Terry Chern

Honorable
Jan 27, 2014
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10,510
Hi I'm new to the community. First of all I have a HP dv7-4153cl pavilion laptop. I've had it for about 3 years now and a while back it basically would have a black screen whenever I opened it and the caps lock buttons began blinking. After countless hours of research I read up on the method of overheating the laptop by wrapping it and then once it overheated it would start up normally again. However this was not a one time fix and I ended up having to do it every so often to get it to work again. Soon thereafter I now just overheated it and it should be working normally but instead all the pixels are jumbled up with multople pixels everywhere. Do I have a burnt GPU in my laptop? The GPU is an ATI mobility radeon 4250 HD. And if so being burnt would it be viable to open it up and fix it by soldering it or some other way. Or even worse case could I buy an external GPU and somehow hook it up to the USB port or something? Or would I just have to resort to. Buying a new laptop. Any help or tips would be greatly appreciated. Thanks! By the way this is my first Time posting on these forums so yeah thanks
 
Solution
External GPUS are way too expensive and big to carry them around all the time. I'd send it to a repair shop or get a new one

brady121294

Honorable
Jun 14, 2012
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10,660
You cannot use an external GPU.. Although Gigabyte showed off an external GPU at CES 2014.. But that's a long time from release. It sounds like the GPU could be dying, if you need to overheat the laptop just to turn it on you should be looking at getting a new one.
 

Terry Chern

Honorable
Jan 27, 2014
2
0
10,510
I'm not really interested in gaming and trying to get the most budget friendly way to get laptop working again. I read up somewhere that external graphics cards can be used instead of my integrated mobility processor. So can't I just buy one and attach it to get it working normally again? Thanks!